1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an ophthalmic photographic apparatus, and more particularly to an ophthalmic photographic apparatus being capable of providing electronic fluorescent photographic images.
2. Description of the Prior Art
An eye fundus camera is an example of this type of ophthalmic photographic apparatus. With an eye fundus camera such as a CCD video camera, images of the eye fundus are obtained and processed to be displayed on a monitor and/or stored in an external storage device. When the eye fundus images obtained are fluorescent images, the images are displayed and/or stored not as color images but as monochrome images.
The above-described eye fundus camera has a number of drawbacks. For example, since fundus images obtained with the eye fundus camera described above are to be stored as monochrome images, a mode conversion button provided on the operation section or image processing section has to be operated to change the mode from color mode to monochrome mode. If, therefore, the operator should forget to change the mode back to color mode for conducting color photography instead of fluorescent photography, it will not be possible to obtain color images. Or, conversely, if the operator should forget to change the mode to monochrome mode during fluorescent photography, the fluorescent photographic images will be obtained and stored as ordinary color images, which afterwards will therefore have to be converted to monochrome images. A further problem is that when photographing many fluorescent images one after another, the conversion process takes time and effort and requires increased system storage capacity.